The Blood behind the Veil
by Writer Awakened
Summary: FE10. OR, "What Becomes of Treachery." Without her helmet, she is Daddy's little girl. With her visor down, she is a killer. Jill, Haar, and the battle in the marshes of Ribahn. Slight spoilers for FE10.


_The Blood behind the Veil_

-

Haar is convinced that Hell is a cold place. As he flies over the dark, fetid swamp waters of the Ribahn River, he wonders lazily about the mysteries of humankind. As he flies, he stares down into the gray-black murk below him and it looks back at him through amorphous eyelids. As he flies, he thinks. As he flies, he wonders.

_What does not kill me makes me stronger_, he thinks as the rain begins to fall on him. It is a cold day, and it seems to Haar that bad things always happen on cold days.

Haar yawns. He has returned to Begnion, and the memories, one by one, flood his mind again. The gates have been opened. The image of Begnion that knifed itself in most foreigners' minds was the surreally-white dreamscape of spires and cathedrals. Begnion, the goddess' chosen land, home to the descendants of Altina herself. Haar looks around at the grayness and the reeds and the little swords and axes rising and falling in the world below.

_This is Begnion, too_, he thinks. _This is their dirty little secret._

Sienne is the pretty little mask Begnion wears on stage to fool the rest of the world into believing in its righteousness. Begnion is the poxed drab that paints her face and gilds her loins with silk and jewels and gold to hide the grotesquerie in her soul. With the great grille on his helm lifted up, Haar can see, even with one eye, what most refuse to see with two. The dark, opaque waters of the Ribahn marshes are a microcosm of Begnion itself: the bloody Begnion that few outsiders ever knew, the cold, unforgiving country that made monsters out of men and spirited its ghosts away in glass jars, dusty cathedrals, and lightless oubliettes. Haar wonders if even the little apostle knows what the people of her land truly believed. Maybe she hides from the truth, or maybe she is old enough to know that she _must_ lie, that the truth kills as surely and as painfully as any sword or poignard in the back. The veil concealing the whole of Begnion is white and gold, but its heart is cold and bleeds a muddy, wretched black.

_Now I remember why I left. Shiharam always did prefer Talrega to the ivory towers and churches, didn't he. He'd rather raise his daughter in an honest place like Daein, where the darkness doesn't hide behind a pretty face._

Haar sighs and keeps gazing downward, peering into the abyss, because he fears the alternative. When he finally looks up, he sees the great green wyvern and the red rider pulling on its reins and he wishes he were somewhere else, somewhere warm and quiet and peaceful. He watches with his one good eye as she approaches, and he thinks, how easy it would be to close that eye and pretend this were a fight like any other. He clenches tightly onto his poleax. One swing is all it would take, he thinks. Only one.

But Haar does not close his eyes. The backs of his eyelids watch him in the darkness, and Haar does not like being watched. So instead he keeps his one good eye wide open as Jill closes in on him, her silvery lance catching fragments of whatever light remains in the day.

_ She really is a woman now, _Haar thinks, wondering why it seems so strange to him that she might have grown up just like everyone else. She was always Shiharam's little girl to him, and Haar had trained her and mentored her largely out of gratitude to her old man. His mouth goes dry. There is no way he can fight her.

She finally comes into range, but instead of darting in to strike, Jill pulls up just close enough to let them share glances at each other's faces. When she realizes it is truly, genuinely him, Jill gasps, and for a few awkward seconds, says nothing. Then: "C-Captain Haar! What are you doing here?"

"I should ask you the same thing! How did you get wrapped up in all this? Were you one of the soldiers who helped the new king of Daein depose the Begnion occupation?"

"Yes!" Jill says, rising upright in her saddle. She smiles. "These people are my friends, my comrades."

"So what are you fighting for now? Last time I checked, your army was fighting _against_ Begnion. And now you're fighting _for_ them?"

"We were, but—our commander gave us the order. I can't let my friends down, not after all we've been through."

_That's a pretty stupid reason._

"What about all of us?" Haar says. "We're your friends too, in case you haven't noticed! Are you going to fight us?"

"I—I don't know," says Jill. "Daein is my country. I can't just betray them!"

"What sort of things have they been telling you? You're too easily swayed by the opinions of others, Jill."

"D-Don't lecture me! I don't deserve that!"

"Do they deserve you? After all, you helped them shrug off Begnion's chains, and what do you do? Climb back on their horse. That doesn't seem right, does it?"

"You don't know! You haven't seen—"

"Do you really think they care about how you feel? Do you really think they'll care about what happens to you or Daein once we're all dead?"

Jill breathes in deeply. "I—they—"

"Jill, you're shaking."

She lowers the visor of her helmet. "No. I'm a warrior. I can't betray these people…not again. It doesn't matter why—I have an order!"

"Oh, come now. Now you're just being stupid."

Jill tugs on the reins of her wyvern. Before she might have prolonged her hesitation, but now she seems resolved, as resolved as Haar has ever seen her.

"Do you know what _loyalty_ is, Jill?!" he yells, but she has already lowered her head. Her lance is in the right position for a mortal tilt.

Jill's mount soars forward and Haar knows it is time to move. He spurs his wyvern downward, just barely flying past the blow of her long spear as she cuts above him in a smooth arc. He holds his weapon down at his side and refuses to lift it up.

"Jill!" he cries as their beasts turn about in mid-flight to face off for another tilt. She doesn't even hear. Maybe she does not want to hear. As her beast splits the sky, Haar can hear her shouting with all her might, wordless and angry. This time, Haar is too slow to evade the strike, and the silver head of her lance scrapes across his wyvern's black scales as he darts aside. She is too skilled and too agile to miss again. The beast cries out and Haar pulls back on the reins; it is all he can do not to fall off when the wyvern thrashes and bucks beneath him.

_She's going to kill me. I'm finally going to die here._

Their mounts soar forward again across the ashen sky and again the tip of Jill's lance digs through the side of Haar's wyvern. Lubricous ebony scales fall and splash inaudibly into the muddy swamp far below. It seems nothing distracts Jill now, not the sound of his wyvern growling and gnashing, nor the sound of the black wind whistling a dissonant dirge through the air. She turns her wyvern around quickly and sends it rushing in again without a lost moment.

_Goddess, Jill, do you want me to die?_

Haar pulls his mount downward again to dodge the lance darting towards its belly. The silvery head of the spear soars over his beast's body, but Haar himself is not so lucky. The lance clangs violently against his helm and he feels steel slam against his forehead, colliding with his teeth. The force of the blow throws him back against the cantle of his saddle, and when he rises up again and turns his beast around for another tilt, his head is rattling and spinning and his mouth is full with the taste of blood and loose teeth. He only hopes that beneath his dark mask, Jill cannot see the blood flowing down his scalp, trickling down his chin. He wonders if she can smell his fear now. He can.

_Hurts…my head, Goddess…_

Haar has barely the time to straighten his helm and steel his sight before Jill races at him again. He cannot see under her scarlet helmet, but in the third eye of his mind—the only eye that was ever good to him—he thinks he can see Jill smiling, baring her teeth at the prospect of the hunt. He thinks he can see her laughing, trying to soothe her festering wounds with a balm of mirth and joy, trying to spirit away all the lies she had been told and all the doubts that gnawed longingly at her with a salve of coldness and numbness.

All his thoughts keep Haar from reacting in time. Jill's lance catches him in the left shoulder where his spaulder did not keep him, and the entire head broke off in the rings of his mail, its tip puncturing shallowly in Haar's flesh. He cries out in pain and his left hand slips from his poleax.

_She's going to kill me._

With his one good arm, he clenches his poleax tighter. It is now only the thin electric strands of adrenaline giving him the strength to lift the weapon he once could lift effortlessly. He can hear the sound of Jill grumbling angrily as she casts aside the silver-steel shards of her broken lance and withdraws a poleax of her own, a child of the one that Haar holds desperately in his hands. Now it is truly kin pitted against kin.

_I can't die. Not yet._

She turns her wyvern around, its great green wings slicing through the air. The way it turns is so effortless and quick. In a few seconds it is ready for another tilt, as full of life and energy as it had been when first it had charged.

_I need to tell you what he told me._

Haar gasps for breath, spitting out another loose tooth. He feels dizzy and weak, and he can almost feel the blood pooling around his shoulder, underneath his mail. His jet-black wyvern whimpers and wails as if supplicating to the Mother of Begnion. The skies tell Haar its orisons have fallen on deaf ears.

_ Oh, Goddess…no. I won't have the chance to say._

He is cold. His fingers cold within his gauntlets, his toes cold inside his greaves, his heart cold and shallow beneath his ribs.

_Help_

Time passes in splinters.

_Kill me_

Heartbeats.

_Want to die_

Broken fragments.

_Kill you_

She raises her poleax up high into the air.

_So tired_

His wyvern moves and he doesn't know why. If his beast is moving it is because it knows without knowing to bring him to his Goddess-ordained fate.

_That's war_

He's too far away now. His entire consciousness is in his right arm. He lifts his poleax and screams. Somehow he finds a manner of strength that he thought had escaped him.

_Death_

In his mind's eye—the only eye that has never done him wrong—he sees her mouth "Daddy."

_Just die_

_ Just stop_

With every last infinitesimal fragment of strength left in his body, he brings his axe crashing down into the soft, fleshy underbelly of her wyvern, and she does the same. He can't see anymore. The mist in the air and in his eye is thick, too thick to see through. But he hears screams. The shrieking of drakes and the startled cry of a girl barely a woman. Then their mounts collide in a burst of shuddering wings and squamous flesh scratching and scraping together. Unceremoniously, the two riders fall together with their entangled wyverns, a comet of ill omen streaking menacingly towards the nothingness below. When they make contact with the marsh, the waters splash, a sickening crashing sound, and the other winged combatants locked in combat high above spare precious seconds to gaze at what had come to pass beneath.

Haar cannot see Jill sputter and swim from the deep murk to the shallows of the far bank, but he can feel himself being pulled, pulled away. All around him, the sight of blackness, the sound of distant clamor—it is as though his ears are concave bowls and the dying screams of the bloodied will never reach his senses or his soul.

_Kill_

Floating nowhere, he thinks he sees his master.

_Just kill me_

His master, his commander and teacher, rarely belied his emotions, but even through the cloudy veil, Haar can see him, and he is smiling.

_Just wanted death_

The vision of his superior fades and Haar thinks he sees Jill again, naked and exposed behind a veil of silken red. There is no one else on the other side of the veil, and Haar can feel without truly knowing how lonely she is there, trapped behind a memory or maybe just a wall of dreams.

_She dead too?_

For a moment, he thinks he hears her calling his name.

_Can I sleep? Is it finally my time to go?_

No, now he is _sure_ he hears her calling his name.

"Captain! Captain! Captain Haar! Captain Haar!"

Haar sees the muddied banks of the Ribahn just in time to help a friendly pair of hands pull his waterlogged helm off. On bloody hands and knees scraped raw, the cold captain coughs up the mud and muck and algae and water, throat scrabbling for the slightest bit of air. Three minutes pass, or perhaps three centuries, and Haar finally lifts his head up to see the friendly hands that have been gently cradling him.

"J-Jill." He climbs slowly to one knee, his logged sinuses flaring with the overwhelming sunburst of swamp-water. He feels like he could cough forever, hacking away his entire existence, but finally he manages to complete a sentence. "You're…you're alive, aren't you?"

"And you're alive, too."

"They just can't kill me, can they?" he said, and laughed grimly, which turned into another fit of wet coughing. "So…you going to finish me off?"

"Do you want me to?"

Haar looks over at his young understudy. She had removed her red full helm and set her poleax beside her. Her face is almost as bad as his, Haar reckons: her cheeks are crusted with dirt and dried blood and a wide gash on her scalp yields trickles of blood down between her eyes. She gives him a doleful look and suddenly he doesn't know what to feel.

Haar shakes his head and after a wistful pause and a few remembrances of that wretched day when all he wanted to do was kill and die, he answers, "No. Not unless you want to, of course."

"I don't want to fight you, Captain," says she, with a touch of defiance that was patently her. "And I won't. I refuse."

He wipes the blood off his chin and finds another loose tooth in his mouth to spit out. Haar has known her for many years, but for some reason, Jill's sincerity and her resoluteness thoroughly surprise Haar. Even her feelings of confusion and anger are utterly genuine.

"There's…something I have to tell you," Haar says. "Before anything else. What your father wanted for you."

"Daddy? I mean…Father? What do you mean?"

"Do you know how great your father was?"

"Y-Yes, I know. You've told me."

"Four of the five great nations of Tellius would certainly name him traitor and turncoat if they saw him," Haar says, rising to his feet. "If the senate found him they'd kill him themselves. He committed perfidy and abandoned his homeland. Ashera herself might say he is damned to the darkest pit in hell for that treason."

Haar takes a deep breath, and when he is sure that he and Jill are alone on this empty, muddy riverbank, he continues.

"But he was true to himself. Other people couldn't see behind that curtain, that 'treachery'. They thought him a man who never paid his debts, beholden to nothing and nobody, a false man with no honor and no loyalty. They saw his—his _betrayal_ of his country and nothing more. But I knew better, and you should too. He was true to himself to the very end. He took the path _he_ thought was right. He didn't let the words of others decide his fate."

Haar sighs. "I was _going_ to kill you, Jill," he says sadly. He cannot bear to look her in the eyes. "But I wanted you to see. You can't come to me or your father for answers. Shiharam is dead and someday soon I'll meet my maker too. Hell, we _probably_ all will. But…" he turns to her and her eyes are welling with tears. It is all he can do not to cry himself. "If your heart is set here, fighting with this army against Ike's, then you _fight._ And you live without regretting those choices you make. Hell, I'm not here to recruit you. I _can't_. Your father didn't want you to live that way, blindly following what he or I or anyone else says. And if that army's where you want to be…"

Haar reaches into his belt and withdraws a small knife, the only weapon on his person that has not been lost to the marshes. Then he throws it away. He looks up to the sky and bares his raw, ruddy neck to her.

"Then we're enemies. So kill me. I won't stop you. Just do it."

"We're not enemies," she says slowly, through a mouth wet with tears and blood. "I can't fight you. _No_."

Haar chuckles dryly. "You're a pretty bad soldier."

"I know. I _know_ I am. I'm not the soldier my father was, and I'll probably never be. But—but either way, I can't kill you, Captain Haar! I can't do it. I don't want to."

"And stubborn, too."

"Ohhh…"

"All those soldiers…they've all families too, all faces and names and homes. So how is it you can kill them but not me?"

Jill sniffles. "I—I'm sorry."

"It's hard to see, but behind their helms, behind their masks, they're all made of flesh and blood, just as we are. And each of them is fighting for something. So make sure that you know where your allegiances lie. I've already made peace with that. _Jill_. Look at me!"

His eyes bore into her and she returns his glance unflinchingly. "This isn't the face of a hero. We're not heroes. I'm certainly not. We do all we can and sometimes our only rewards are scars like these." Without hesitation, wipes his face with the back of his hand and sees it painted red. He holds it out so she can see.

"You understand? You can't regret anything in this life. You live and die the same way you were born: _free_."

Jill nods, and Haar barely has a moment to smile when she leaps at him and girds him with her muddy arms.

"Thank you," she murmurs in his thawing ear. "I know what I'm gonna do. I won't leave you again. Ever."

"Don't worry," he says, cradling her head close to his chest. "We can be traitors together. Sometimes all you need is…well, someone to run away _with_."


End file.
